Many government agencies have established a centralized software testing organization that is staffed with experts in test planning, test script writing, test environment management, and test evaluation and analysis. These organizations often rely largely on manual testing, with test coverage limited by budgets and staffing. This usually increases risks to both schedules and application quality by leaving portions of systems untested and/or requiring additional time to deliver and address test results.

In most environments, some amount of manual testing should supplement and validate automated tests. However, a manual testing organization does not scale well: With a larger number of smaller, integrated apps being developed at a faster pace, and with increasing security requirements, manual testing alone would require a massive increase in the number of testers, diverting budgeted funds from other important initiatives. Even if the organization could hire enough manual testers, new testers may require months or years to become fully capable within the agency’s unique environment and testing strategies.

The solution to achieve quality tests without these limitations is to embrace a mature test automation strategy, particularly if your organization plans to tie automated testing to a CI/CD pipeline as part of a DevSecOps strategy.

A Strategic Approach: Citizant’s Test Automation Framework

Citizant can create a tailored Test Automation plan to meet the maturity level and specific needs of any organization. For agencies that want a comprehensive, strategic approach to testing automation, Citizant starts by developing a Test Automation Framework. The Test Automation Framework places guardrails around scope while still providing enough room for ideation and the development of creative solutions. We evaluate and create a centralized test data management practice following four major standardized phases:

To support the adoption of the Test Automation Framework, the agency will need to train government and contractor full-time employees in Test Automation tools, processes, and standards. Citizant created a 5-day, immersive Test Automation Boot Camp that teaches software testing automation. The boot camp features hands-on exercises and experiences allowing participants to design and conduct effective automated tests using Rational Functional Tester or Selenium. Additional instruction and exercises on other adopted tools can be added to the boot camp as needed. Citizant’s instructors are specialists in Quality Assurance (QA), Agile concepts, and automated testing, and leverage their software development, test management, and customer domain knowledge to ensure the training focuses on details of performing automated testing, tailored to the agency’s testing environment.

Citizant’s Test Automation Boot Camp produces reliable testers who understand the issues, tools, and processes for effective automated testing. Graduates have access to a testing coach and Citizant’s boot camp instructors for a year following course completion. Boot camp graduates bring these new tools and perspectives back to their development and testing teams to help the organization design and build tests that improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the automated test process.

Automated testing also evaluates code quality using SonarQube, which checked the quality of 86,000 lines of code for one application in less than 3 minutes.

We collaborated with one agency’s testing organization to automate test cases previously run manually. For Web services integration testing, we automated 60 test scripts for ReadyAPI and SoapUI. Each of these manual tests previously took 15 minutes. After automation, the testing organization completed all 60 of these test cases in less than 5 minutes. Automation allows these tests to be triggered overnight or on weekends, without staff needing to watch over the process.